New London — It was all there on the pastry table, the one her grandson Ellis, the pastry chef, crafted for two weeks in her honor. It was all there on one plate, really, the chocolate banana pancake cookies, that embodied everything Ingrid Cormier ever meant to her friends and family.

Imagine: something so easy to miss on this table full of goodies. But that was Ingrid, whose contributions were often understated and easy to miss, much like the cool breeze on a hot summer day or gentle waves cascading joyfully upon the beach.

Ingrid’s specialty, chocolate banana pancakes, sometimes 500 at a time, underscored her role as one of the matriarchs of the New London American Legion baseball program. No, she wasn’t a coach, like her husband, Hank. She wasn’t a player like her son, Adam. But she was the wind beneath the wings.

“As valuable as any player we ever had. And all behind the scenes,” Jim O’Neill, the architect of the program, was saying Saturday at Ocean Beach during a celebration of life for Ingrid’s 78 years with us. Ingrid Cormier died last month.

“The glue of New London Legion,” O’Neill said. “If we needed a fundraiser, Ingrid did it. If one of us had an idea, Ingrid carried it through. She’ll always be my friend.”

And that was the sentiment that ran like a current throughout the room, warming it through the frigid outside surroundings. Ingrid Cormier’s passions had many tentacles, from her vocation as an advocate for children and families, to her own family and friends and then all the way to Florida, where Hank and Ingrid spent their winters with, as longtime friend Tom Donnee said, “The Connecticut Mafia.”

Ingrid was also the extended family’s air traffic control, the filter for all vital information.

“She was Facebook before there was Facebook,” her son Hank said.

There was also her role as historian, evidenced by her New London Legion scrapbooks from 1985 and 1986, the two years that O’Neill and Hank Cormier authored perhaps the most notable athletic accomplishment in this region’s history: back to back World Series teams. The first page of the 1985 book featured the headline, “all the way to Kokomo,” otherwise known as Kokomo, Ind.

Funny, though, how the day’s rhythms kept ping-ponging off those pancakes.

“At that time, the two big social events for our teams were the pool party and the pancake breakfast,” said Casey O’Neill, a program alum and star of GameDay. “We would go to Greentree Dr. in Waterford where my aunt and uncle (Ingrid and Hank) lived. You never saw anything like it. The Cormiers in full military mode in the kitchen and Aunt Ingrid was the general.

“They had five griddles going and vats of batter. Think about it. There’s more than a dozen hungry players. They had to make 500 hubcap-sized pancakes. And then when she died, I ran into (fellow program alum) Matt McGuiness and the first thing he said about her was ‘great pancakes.’ Imagine. This 55-year-old man was suddenly 16 again. That’s the Ingrid nobody ever saw.”

Except Hank, her husband of 57 years. They were quite the team. Ingrid Cormier worked for the state of Connecticut and Hank was the city’s most popular pharmacist at the Medicine Shoppe. It was difficult at times for Hank to talk on Saturday, understandably so, pondering the loss of his life’s partner. But he did allude to the song “You Were Mine” by the Fireflies, released in 1959, whose lyrics said it all:

“You were mine at the time and the feeling was sublime; You were mine, you were mine, you were mine, you were mine; You were really, really mine and I know that our love was a love of true love.”

If we’re fortunate enough, we have an Ingrid in our lives somewhere. The ones for whom the background is really the foreground. So the next time you feel the gentle breeze of summer or the gentle waves on the sand, think about their true significance. And then a happy thought for Ingrid Cormier.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro